Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong - 'Ella and Louis'

I don't really know anything about this record - for me, it's a really cool recording of two people at the top of their game, effortlessly swinging through a few standards. But maybe connoisseurs know this to be a cheesy commercial cash-in - whatever, I love it. There's a sleepy, languid quality to a lot of this. Even when they step it up on 'They Can't Take That Away From Me', you get the impression that they're both still sitting down.

I think I bought this from the now defunct chain 'Our Price' while living in Salisbury in the late 1980s. When I got it home, I was blown away by the warmth and intimacy of the recording. I'd just started getting into to hip hop, and this was the opposite of processed, sequenced music, a record in the truest sense - a recording of a performance. They probably knocked this out in an afternoon. To me, brilliant, warm, and deeply soulful.

It reminds me of sunny autumnal Sunday mornings in a bedsit in Salisbury, a rare moment of quiet between work and play. Which, thinking about it, meant being hungover and freezing.

Tracks: Can't We Be Friends, Isn't This A Lovely Day, Moonlight in Vermont, They Can't Take That Away From Me, Under a Blanket of Blue, Tenderly, A Foggy Day, Stars Fell on Alabama, Cheek to Cheek, The Nearness of You, April in Paris.

Catalogue Number: Verve 825 373-1